The Negative Aspects of Internet Success

If you’ve never heard of Michael Arrington or TechCrunch, it’s likely you don’t follow technology weblogs (or websites) all that much. In the tech slice of the blogosphere, he’s well known for his quality weblog that covers primarily Internet startups. Even though he has other writers now as well, the site’s a source of tech news for many hundreds of thousands of readers, and probably thousands of other tech bloggers, who write their own synposes and link back to him. And of course, there are all the advertisers that are more than happy to advertise, pushing Arrington’s monthly ad revenues into the US$60,000-plus range. That’s monthly, not yearly.

Finally, there are all the web startup companies dying to get covered in the popular site, whose RSS subscribers alone number 400,000+. I have no idea how that translates into daily pageviews of the weblog, but it’s a lot – maybe millions.

Of course, with such success comes people over eager to a chance to meet with the man himself. So much so that they’ve taken to bursting into his home, while he’s sleeping. It’s the easiest way to get hold of him, since his office in the house. According to a recent Wired magazine article, Arrington has at least one unnannounced visitor per week. That’s because, to entpreneurs, he wields a lot of promotional power.

Though I don’t think I’ve ever seen a truly negative article on TechCrunch, since I started reading, I’d think that even that would generate traffic for a startup company doing business on the Internet. Venture capitalists take notice of any company written up on the site. So therein probably lies much of the boldness for people to literally break in to Arrington’s house in hopes of talking to him.

Would that one of my sites even get one thousandth the interest. Be careful what you wish for, I guess. And remember that there are several big dogs here 🙂 Best of luck to all of you who aspire high on the Internet scale of success.